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Friday, March 21, 2014

I am not claiming to be an expert on Russia or even of the
former Soviet Union. I’ve never liked the word expert since there is no clear
definition as to the level of competence or wealth of knowledge a person needs
to qualify.Some people reach a state of
recognition in their chosen field where such a declaration seems obvious enough
to all concerned that there is no argument, but those people rarely refer to
themselves as experts. Usually it is the people the are envious of those
established professionals and are attempting to imbue themselves with such
recognition to that point in time is not self evident, much to their
dissatisfaction.

Russia is not my current field so I’m not placed anywhere on
this scale. My chosen field is Security, and I have spent all my adult life in
its service starting in the Army and working to a place in upper management
responsible for corporate security. Through interest and I dare say aptitude, I
transferred to IT Security, finding it more rewarding and discovering that my
past experience dealing with questions of Risk Management and creating regulatory
compliant programs gave me a unique perspective in the field of IT Security.
One shared by few and therefore valuable to whomever employs me.

But Security didn’t start out as my career of choice. When I
was young, I wanted to be a stunt man. Unfortunately, I had no desire to live
in California and there is precious little work for a stuntman in Bemidji
Minnesota, though I made of for that by doing stunts pro bono. Next I thought I
would follow in my father’s footsteps, not in practicality but in ambition and
become a helicopter pilot in the Army. He’d been an electrician in both the Air
Force and Coast Guard, and in the latter was able to test fly the aircraft he
repaired. He had time in all manner of fixed wing and even rotary aircraft, but
lacking a degree, he was never able to do it full time.

My eyes betrayed me, but in retrospect I’m glad for it,
since had they been as perfect as my father’s vision, I would have been forced
to face the truth that my poor performance in High School would have served as
a backup to sabotage that dream. I joined the Army and that is a long tail and
told elsewhere, but the main reason for my service was to escape my hometown
and pay with my time for a chance to attend college.

When I hatched this plan at seventeen, it seemed like a
fairytale. Four years was a long time and my goal was poorly defined. It was
simply put the quest for a degree. The nature of the degree never occurred to
me. But as fate would have it, I found myself at the end of my four-year tour
and when faced with the choice of re-enlisting, I stuck to my plan and returned
to Minnesota in search of the mythical degree. I spent my first two years in
school blissfully unaware how I would declare, sure that when the time came, I
would be struck by inspiration. And so it happened and I once again had the
Army to thank. On active duty, I served as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal
technician. That job didn’t exist in the Army Reserve at the time and
eventually when it did, wasn’t located in Minnesota. The first job I took was
as an Intelligence Analyst. I worked in that capacity one weekend a month and
two weeks a year in an OJT status. My region was selected for me and was
Eastern Europe. My first contract ended after six years and I became a
civilian. I enjoyed being able to grow my hair out and lamented my inability to
grow a decent looking beard. It came in black at that time, what little of it
there was, and since the hair on my head was blond, people assumed I died one
or the other. This isn’t true I just have weird hair.

I was in my second year of college and the pressure was
building to choose a major. Luckily Desert Storm intervened and I felt compelled
to sign a new eight-year Army Reserve contract. I was still in my heart and
mind a soldier and the idea of sitting safely at home while my brothers and
sisters were put in harms way was more than I could stand. I signed up with the
13th Psychological Operations Battalion and took the only
Interrogator slot in the 19th PSYOP Company. After getting back into
the system, I eagerly waited to be deployed, either as an EOD tech again or
with my PSYOP unit. Neither happened because despite the fact that Iraqis speak
Arabic and we had no Iraqi interrogators, that spoke Iraqi, I couldn’t go
because I lacked a language.

The ground war was over in about 100 hours and I never saw a
minute of it. Instead, in early 1991, I was sent to the Defense Language Institute
to learn Russian. The Soviet Union was still a thing back then, at least for
half the time I was at language school. Over Christmas break in died to be
replaced by The Commonwealth of Independent States, and you all know how well
that did.

But I was not deterred. Oh, quite the opposite. You see, the
Soviet Union had been the big bad for all of my life and there was no way that
would even change. When I cam back from my year of submersion into the Russian
language, graduating in the lower part of the lower third of my class, I forgot
about 1 vocabulary word a mile as I drove my Camero back to Minnesota. Of the
eight grammatical cases that those twisted Ottoman monks devised to enslave and
torture the primitive Russian people, I barely retained Nominative a year after
my return.

Armed with the ability to order beer and ask the location of
the bathroom, I majored in Russian Area Studies with a minor in Russian
Language and Literature. I have the rare distinction of being one of the few
people besides Tolstoy to have read War and Peace. It was one whole class and I
think I got a B.

I knew my path would be paved in gold. After all, I had a
degree designed for Intelligence Analysts for the most important country
besides our own in the world and graduated in June 1995. I went home to wait
for the job offers to roll in sure I would need to order an unlisted number so
that I could get some sleep at night and perhaps a new wheelbarrow to get the
mail.

Who could have predicted that for nearly twenty years, no one
either in our government or in private industry would give a damn about Russia?
No seriously, I want to know who the bastard was and why he/she didn’t tell me.
But never mind them, they were in the minority if they existed at all. Most of
them shared my view that the government would always be interested in Russia
and that private industry would boom. There were billions to be made in this
newly formed free market, except there weren’t. A few companies rushed in and
were soon after the struggling Russian government seized them and companies
lost millions. The US government had other issues in other lands and arrogantly
considered the matter of the Soviet Union closed. We had won, and no one that
had an opposing viewpoint was taken seriously. There were hundreds of articles
and books discussing the shift from a bi polar political landscape to a multi
polar model. There were a slew of predictions about the new unstable landscape
and some of them even came true, but neither the government nor private industry
cared enough about Russia to invest much time and effort into it. Those that
did had a huge pool of radically more knowledgeable and experienced people to
choose from. It has been this way with few exceptions for over twenty years.

Don’t shed any tears for me, it all worked out for the best.
I’m now an executive in the IT security field and not only do I enjoy the work,
but it pays the bills.

While I’m not an expert on Russian affairs, I did get an A
on my thesis, so suck it. I even paid attention after I graduated and watched
Russia and it’s former states change over time and become a Democr….Sorry, I
tried to type if but was over taken by a laughing fit. I also realize I’ve made
you wait long enough for my in depth analysis of the current situation with
Russia and the Annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. So without further ado:

Putin is batshit crazy.

There you have it folks, the former head of the KGB, now
perpetual President of Russia (who never had to read War and Peace cover to
cover I guarandamntee you) is batshit crazy.

Or if you prefer a more detailed analysis, please read the
following response to an FB post where even pacifists were wondering if perhaps
militaries had uses after all.

Anyone sane is antiwar, especially
soldiers. A soldier hopes their country is right and just in the use of force.

This is a case of a bully using
force to take what he wants from a weaker nation. The United States has been
the week nation in need of help and the stronger nation offering help.

We have entered into wars for
terrible reasons and refused to offer assistance where it was desperately
needed. I think we need to offer our assistance in conjunction with NATO. This
is not some ambiguous terrorist threat that is hard to describe and debate in
terms of borders, but a nation state attacking another nation state.

This could be Putin's Poland.
Forget the old domino argument between the USA and USSR that polarized people
for or against action in other countries like Vietnam, where the USSR's
influence was up for debate, this is a probe from Putin to see how much
resistance there will be in his attempt to regain all the former Soviet
territories.

Lack of action now from the
International community will embolden Putin and endanger former Soviet
countries.

There you have it, my opinion about Putin’s motives and the
price of doing nothing but watching Russia steal the Crimea from Ukraine. Like
that perky little kid on Pokemon Putin’s ‘gotta to catch em all’ or die trying.
The question we have to answer for ourselves is do we care? Do we care when a
stronger country picks on a weaker country and no one does anything because
they are afraid of the consequences? Should we care and if so at what point
should we care? Who knows, maybe if we let Putin take Crimea, he’ll go away and
leave Ukraine alone. Maybe he won’t do anything else. Throw a few sanctions on
him, it’s clear sanctions work, just look at North Korea.

I’ve read a lot of critical stories over the last decade
about how the United States is trying to build an Empire. I could go on for
several pages about how that is bullshit, but I don’t need to. The United
Kingdom was an empire. The Soviet Union was an empire. If the US is really
trying to be an empire, we’ve been going about it the wrong way. We sure as
hell wouldn’t care what anyone else said in the international arena and we
wouldn’t struggle about what to do when any of our interests were threatened.
Accusations of Empire are an old chestnut that is trotted out any time we
engage in any military action.

But despite being the most incompetent empire of all time,
we have engaged in wars that we shouldn’t and our war fighters suffered the
most. They join for many reasons, but they depend on our government to use them
wisely. Most times that means not using them at all, just making sure they are
the best equipped and trained force on the planet. Other times that means using
them in such a way that their objectives are clear and achievable. We’re still
waiting for the later to occur, but I have hope.

Do we use them against Russia? That’s the wrong question. Is
the cause just? That is the right question. Few became and remained a country
for many years because other stronger countries wanted us to. Forget the
propaganda, the reality is that without help from France and Spain, we wouldn’t
have made it. Even with their significant help, we shouldn’t have made it. The
revolutionary war is barely covered in public schools. You can learn more about
it from the old Schoolhouse Rock programs than in a school today. Unless you
get a degree in American History, you aren’t likely to learn much more in
college. If we are to believe the hype, it was a slam-dunk. Washington crossed
the Delaware River in the winter and kicked some British ass. Done deal. End of
story. Oh and it was cold and most of the soldiers didn’t have boots and stuff.
Wow, it’s all flooding back. Couldn’t have taken more that a year or two. I saw
that Patriot movie and I didn’t see the seasons change more than once or twice and
that little girl never aged so the war couldn’t have take that long.

England wanted us to remain as part of their empire but
luckily France and Spain lent us a hand. FRANCE, for fuck sakes. We would have
lost our ass and been part of the British Empire to this day except for France.
How fucked were we? Pretty fucked. There was no reason for anyone to believe
that we could actually win our independence from Britain. Technically we didn’t
win in that we didn’t concourse them or destroy them, but we did make it too
expensive for them to make it worthwhile and they quit. In 1812, Canada almost
put an end the American experiment. CANADA!!! We were not quite the super power
we would eventually grow into, but we had allies. In WWI, we hesitated far too
long but eventually assisted our allies to include England. Most of our
bragging rights revolve around WWII and while fighting two wars simultaneously
was an impressive feat, we never face the full might of the German Army. Russian
had that distinction and they lost millions of people.

Now we’re stronger. It isn’t likely that we need to worry
about defending our soil from Canada again any time soon. We might be safe from
China and even Russia, despite its proximity to Alaska (insert Palin joke).
Other countries aren’t so lucky. We are now the big strong country that is able
to assist others. Do we use that military only in retaliation when we are
attacked? Does we have to wait until their is another global conflict that
directly impacts our bottom line?

There are many dubious excuses for past use of military
might. Our liberal elite have ridiculed most of these and they were right to do
just that. What though do we do when there is a legitimate need from a country
too weak to defend itself from a bully like Putin? Make statements that we
can’t be the world’s police? I agree, we can’t. The UN can, it’s kind of in
their job description, and we can assist the UN. Action should be debated
within a reasonable time and taken by a unified force. We have a part to play
in an action deemed justified. Not just by one of the political parties for
political gain, but of the free nations of the world, for they are ever mindful
of the fact that they could be next.

Thursday, March 13, 2014

The most recent episode of Marvel Agents of SHIELD was
disappointing. The episode in question is entitled: Yes Men and features SIF
come to earth to retrieve Amora, a sorceress that has the ability to enslave
men with her words and the enslavement is guaranteed if she can touch them.
My problem isn’t with the bastardization of Norse mythology or even deviations
from the original comic. I’m taking this show as a stand-alone effort and so
far I’ve enjoyed it.

My problem with the latest episode is lazy writing. Either
it is lazy writing or a crappy premise that they had to write around. No, I
take that back, it is still lazy ass writing. It’s lazy because it wasn’t
consistent within the confines the show had set up. Forget external consistency,
I rarely make those arguments for that way lies madness, especially with all of
the remakes and reimaginings going on throughout the land.

I do hold a television show or movie accountable for keeping
true to the characters they have set up and consistency in their actions. I’ll
even cut them brakes for different seasons and make an exception within a given
season if there is sufficient motivation like some life changing event.

There were two huge and one minor inconsistency in this
episode that I can’t overlook and they ruined it for me. I’ll give them another
chance, but if this is a trend, I’m out.

Warning!! Spoilers Ahead!!

#1.

This is when Ward is out back of the biker bar and Amora
lands behind him. Earlier in the episode, they spent time covering two pieces
of new information. The first is that they have new updated weapons that
disable, not kill that are three times as powerful than their predecessors and
even managed to lose the “extra ounce”.They took these new weapons along with the express purpose of disabling
Amora and any man she turned. Would it work on Amora? We never got to find out.
The second piece of information was when Sif briefed the entire team on what
Amora could do with her voice and her touch. The message? Don’t even let her
talk to you but you sure as hell better not let her touch you.

So what does the most lethal and effective agent on the team
do when he turns around and sees Amora? He begins a dialogue. His new fangled
pistol is pointing right at her and he knew how dangerous she was and he starts
chatting her up and of course she walks closer as she talks. Ward is not yet
under her spell but lets this Fem Fatale get within touching distance without
giving her the old non-lethal double tap. Of course she touches him and that
drives the crappy premise forward.

Amora could have just jumped on top of him and touched him
before he could react. She is Asgardian after all. But nooooooooo. They have to
make one of the strongest and most lethal agent in SHIELD a dumb ass because they are
lazy.

#2.

When Fitz is taken over and he lures Sif into the cell with
the promise of the fixed collar that is used to prohibit Amora from speaking.
Once on, not only is she unable to snare new men but all previously snared men
are instantly freed. It is critical for Sif and SHIELD to fix and then affix the
collar on Amora. It would be Amora’s #1 priority once she was back on the
plane to destroy it completely. She wore it by her own account for six hundred
years. She hates it, precious, hates it!!! Fitz knows this yet apparently
before he was enslaved, he fixed it. Then after he was taken over he left the
fixed and fully functional collar in the cell to lure Sif to her death (though
Amora would know that the fall wouldn’t kill Sif). Either Amora herself or Fitz
as her devoted new pet would have destroyed the damned thing. Of course if it
was destroyed, we couldn’t have our simple episode wrap up. Even if Fitz didn’t
destroy it, he could have damaged it. Sif couldn’t fix it, only Fitz could. So
why not at least re-brake it and leave it in the cell for Sif? Again, because
the only way to free Fitz was to put the collar back on Amora, because
apparently Simmons (Fitz’s female science partner) lacked the skill (this could
actually be a forth inconsistency).

#3.

The minor inconsistency was the fact that the collar, a
device of Asgardian design, was broken by a shotgun blast in the first place. Amora, who is wicked strong, is unable to cause it any damage. But fine,
they could have had a scene with Sif and Amora fighting over it and leaving it
bent or Sif’s sword could have damaged it if only they had the fight scene
earlier between the two. There are probably a dozen better ways to tell the
same story and hit the same main points and yet remain consistent to the
storyline set forth in the first 14 episodes. Instead, the writers seemed to
have phoned this one in, content that two very attractive new women would
distract the viewers from the fact of just how bad the episode was.